


Not Quite Stormtroopers

by Jedi Buttercup (jedibuttercup)



Series: Voices Like Thunder [11]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Comic), Falling Skies
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Non-Graphic Violence, Post Season 1, Post Season 8, Rescue, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-28
Updated: 2011-08-28
Packaged: 2017-10-23 03:43:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedibuttercup/pseuds/Jedi%20Buttercup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Buffy wasn't sure what she'd been expecting to find inside the leg of the Skitter structure, but it wasn't the endless steel spiderweb of open space they'd actually encountered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Quite Stormtroopers

Buffy craned her neck upward, staring through the dimly lit tangle of steel beams crossing back and forth as far as she could see, and swore under her breath. "Shit."

She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting to find inside the leg of the Skitter structure, but it wasn't the endless steel spiderweb of open space they'd actually encountered. She'd thought it would be mostly solid, with a staircase or some kind of alien elevator to carry the ground-level workers upward, and even worried that whatever space lay beyond the access arch wouldn't allow them passage all the way to the top. She'd forgotten to account for the Skitters' six legs and amazing climbing abilities.

Kennedy scowled upward next to her, checking out the positions of the crossbeams nearest the asphalt level while she and Buffy switched their mech bullets for Scythe rounds. "We can still do this," she murmured, "but it's going to be a bitch bringing Mason out this way, even if he's a hundred percent."

"We might be able to steal one of their shuttle things," Zahra whispered.

Kennedy snorted. "Yeah, and did any of us ever have flying lessons? Horses, I can handle; planes, not so much. And that's before you get into the whole alien factor."

"It can't be _that_ hard," Zahra murmured, but shrugged to concede the point.

"Well, we'll just have to cross that killing field when we come to it," Buffy said, then holstered her handgun again and leapt upward, landing in a crouch on the lowest of the horizontal beams. Kennedy and Zahra followed as she navigated around the angled beam intersecting hers and leapt for what looked to be the next stable point in their deconstructed staircase.

They were about thirty-five feet off the ground, far enough up the angled metal structure that 'down' was no longer centered over asphalt but rather part of the thick metal wall, when the humming moan of returning mechs echoed up through the narrow space; Buffy swallowed, and exchanged a glance with Kennedy. "I guess Stasia's gone to ground already," she said, worry sinking like a stone in her stomach.

Zahra cocked her head, then whistled lowly. "She must have taken down a bunch of them, though. Unless they're guarding her somewhere – it sounds like maybe only half of them came back."

Buffy opened her mouth again to reply – then froze as Kennedy hissed and waved them both to silence. "Shhh. Behind us," she breathed, quietly enough that a normal person wouldn't have heard her.

Buffy braced one hand against the beam under her crouching legs and turned her head – only to swallow convulsively as she saw what Kennedy had freaked over. A handful of yards away, tucked up against the slanting ceiling-slash-wall where the base of several crossbeams met, a slightly concave platform held a Skitter nest. Literally, a nest; something soft had been spread over the hard, rough surface of the curving metal, and on that cloth lay sprawled half a dozen curled up children, each one with the ugly growth of a harness sprouting from their spines. A Skitter sprawled atop the pile, eyes closed, its six rough, slimy green limbs stretched out so as to encompass all of the children in its sleeping grasp.

"Oh, my god," Zahra choked out, making a retching noise in the back of her throat.

Aware now what to look for, Buffy scanned up and down the sloped passageway, making note of other platforms tucked amid particularly dense tangles of metal. There were more down than up, which made sense; going by the example of the few kids the Second Mass had managed to save, the harnesses mostly just healed the kids of any curable defects or illnesses during the first few months and adapted them to the control of the Skitters. They wouldn't be able to actually climb like their masters – or fellow slaves, depending on just what Anne's discovery of the harness _inside_ a dead Skitter really meant – until their bodies began growing new, alien tissue on their own. Like Rick. And Ben.

And at least – she couldn't even guess. Several dozen other kids, here inside just one leg of the tower. If they hadn't tried to get Mellie back – if she hadn't died – she might have ended up living like this, growing into one more arrow in their alien conquerors' quiver. Buffy hadn't let herself really think about it in the months since her whole world had narrowed to just eight souls – but how many other Slayers around the globe had fallen into Skitter claws like Mellie? How many slept like this nightly even now?

And that wasn't the only disturbing question the sight of the nests brought up. If Colonel Porter's plan to blow up the structure had succeeded, how many innocents would have died here? Somehow, she didn't think their reports of this mission would make Weaver feel any better about the dozens of Second Mass soldiers who'd died trying to get their hand-built ANFO charges into place. Damned if they did, and damned if they didn't. This wasn't a clear-cut case, like the vampires she'd hunted before the skies fell; the original child _was_ still in there, under the hardwired mind control that made them into the aliens' puppets. But that didn't make them any less dangerous to face.

Her trigger finger itched, and for one sickly hateful moment she wanted nothing more than to drill a Scythe bullet right through the 'mama' Skitter's forehead; even if she couldn't free those particular kids, she could at least rid them of their controller. But if she did that, they'd lose all chance at completing their mission, and maybe bringing back not only Mason but some valuable intel on the Skitters' masters as well. She dragged her gaze away from the nest with an effort, swallowed past the lump in her throat, and jerked a thumb upward for Kennedy's benefit.

Kennedy nodded, eyes haunted, and turned to lead their upward climb, even more quietly than before.

She couldn't have said how long it took them to reach the top; the passageway narrowed further as they went, until there wasn't room for any more nests and the three Slayers had to hand-over-hand their way up through the dense metal maze rather than jumping. But it _did_ go all the way up to the lowest hangar level, as she'd hoped; a barely Skitter-sized gap at the top opened out in the inmost wall of a scorched, damaged flyer bay, probably the one Mason had hit with his mech-metal grenade round. There was plenty of debris for the intruders to hide behind as they emerged, organized into piles, and the illumination level was very nearly as dim as the scattered night lighting below.

Three more clumps of Skitters and their charges, visible from where she stood, told her why: they were the specifically designated repair crews.

"Here we go," she whispered, gesturing them toward what looked like the doorway into the complex proper. Unlike the archways they'd entered through, this one was closed with an actual door, probably auto-triggered by the little box up at shoulder height rather than any kind of knob.

Time to find out if the skinny, storklegged controller beings bothered with electronic locks or scanners. She darted low around the wall until she reached the thing, then stood cautiously to wave a hand in front of the probable scanning mechanism. Kennedy and Zahra positioned themselves at angles where they could fire at anything on the other side without risking a direct shot themselves, tensing as the door opened – then lowered their weapons slightly, peering through into the equally dimly lit corridor beyond.

"I wonder if their planet has a diurnal cycle close to what ours has? Maybe they're _all_ asleep," Zahra whispered.

"We should only be so lucky; you _know_ we've fought Skitters at night before," Kennedy said, then darted through, sweeping her gun in an arc as she checked both directions down the passage and then around the corner at a T-junction just a few paces to their right. "None here, though; and I see what looks like an elevator a few yards down."

Buffy stepped through last of their group, and tried not to jump when the door swished shut abruptly behind her. "We'll probably see more movement on the other levels – this one's under construction."

"Right." They staggered their progress down the hall, covering each other as they moved, then made it to the elevator; fortunately, access to it was controlled much the same way the door had been. That was about where their luck ran out, though. It took them three long minutes of puzzling to figure out how to get the thing to move; the arrow for 'up' was easy enough, but they had no idea which of the other alien symbols indicated 'the floor with the prisoner cells on it' and which meant 'hangar level' or 'fire alarm' or something else equally problematic, and just tapping one of them didn't work; there was an activation button that also had to be hit in turn.

All of the controls were way above comfortable waist height for her, or even Kennedy; it was becoming increasingly obvious that the leadership caste were much, much taller than standard issue humans. And by the time they actually got it to move, they must have triggered _something_ , because the moment the doors opened again they were faced with a mech and a quintet of Skitters, weapons at the ready.

Slayer reflexes saved Zahra as the mech's targeting lasers painted a trio of dots over her heart: she plugged it three times and was halfway through a dive to the floor before it even fired once. She grunted, but Buffy couldn't spare any attention to check on her as Zahra and the mech both collapsed; she was busy firing at the Skitters and executing a dive of her own. So was Kennedy.

The Scythe bullets proved their worth then. Buffy barely managed to tag the three nearest her with one bullet each, and not at all in locations that should have been vital, but each one of them immediately collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, breath rattling in their throats.

"There'll be more where those came from," Kennedy said. "I think I see stairs. There weren't any on the hanger level – but I'm pretty sure we're above those now. We'll probably be better off using them than the elevator again, at least 'til we're on our way out; I memorized which button lit up first, so I know how to retrace our steps when we're done."

"Good," Buffy nodded. "Zahra, are you alright?"

"Fine," the girl grunted, prodding at her upper left arm with the fingers of her other hand. "Just grazed."

"Just one more question," Kennedy put in, then paused long enough to make sure Buffy turned to look her in the eye. "We can still abort without getting ourselves killed. Probably. But if we go past here... it could be the vineyard all over again."

"I know," Buffy said, licking her lips. "But we won't. And not just because of Mason; there's too much to learn here, and we won't get another chance at this."

"Just making sure you'd thought it out," Kennedy nodded. Then more mech footsteps began to echo down the corridor, and she grimaced, gesturing toward the door marked with the corrugated image of a staircase. Some things transitioned the culture barrier, apparently.

It took them three more levels – and another two dozen Skitters and four mechs, on the level they'd _thought_ might be cells only to discover it was storage – to finally find what they were looking for. Buffy hissed at the sight of a tall, skeletally skinny grey-skinned being standing in front of an opening in the corridor wall, blocked off by a shimmering curtain of air; he had a teenage girl with him, probably the Karen that Weaver and Hal had mentioned, and she was saying something in calm, drugged, reasonable tones to the prisoner on the other side of that curtain. A dish of food in her hand testified to the purpose of her being there; Buffy was cheered to see it, because the fact that the Skitter masters were still trying to wheedle him meant that there was still enough of Mason left to offer resistance.

The alien had started to turn at the sound of the door sliding open, so Buffy plugged him without even checking to see what it intended do to them in turn – they couldn't afford to let him transmit their appearance to the Skitter teams hunting them. Then she lifted her gun to do the same for Karen – and hesitated, unable to fire the shot, images of Mellie and a teenage boy in love she barely knew reproaching her for her intentions.

Fortunately, Zahra was on the ball. She flew out of the doorway quicker than Karen could react to her companion's death and dropped the girl to the ground with a very precise chop of her hand. Of the younger Slayers, she was the one that had had the most formal martial arts training; Buffy breathed out a sigh of relief as she stooped to check Karen's pulse and give a nod of acknowledgement.

"Karen! Who's there? Did Weaver send you?" a hoarse male voice sounded from inside the cell; he'd probably been trying to avoid his water ration, too, though he'd have had to drink something by now to still be alive. Or else screaming. She hoped it wasn't due to screaming, but she wouldn't bet on it.

"Sort of," Zahra said, looking up from the fallen harnessee to smile at the prisoner. "We're from the Fifth Mass – what's left of it – and joined the Second a few days ago."

"The Fifth...? What...? Did Porter...?" The professor rasped, frantically, as he slowly approached the curtain from his side. Buffy could see him now, as she hurried up to join Zahra; he was a lot scruffier than in the picture Ben had showed them, with fever-bright eyes and cheeks hollowed by recent, persistent hunger, but he was alert, and didn't look badly wounded or under any other sort of control.

"We've got to hurry; do you know how they open these things?" she asked, ignoring his questions.

"There's – _something_ to the left of the door," he told her, gesturing with a shaking hand. "When they take me out, it beeps several times; there's a code."

"Screw that," Kennedy said, frowning at the indicated panel as another chorus of humming mech power plants began to approach from somewhere else on the level. Then she punched the mechanism as hard as she could, before Buffy could protest. The curtain sputtered for a moment, then steadied – and she punched _again_ , this time into the wall just beside the panel, which like the rest of the structure had been built from standard salvaged Earth materials rather than the stronger mech metal. The wall caved in, she yanked something that looked like a tangle of spaghetti out – and the curtain sputtered again, this time fading away into nothingness.

Not a moment too soon. Mason tried to shuffle toward her, a mixture of hope and despair in his features that made her heart hurt, but whether from hunger or hidden injury, he was moving at about the speed of a crawl; Buffy shook her head and leaned forward, bracing her shoulder against his stomach, then stood up again, heading full tilt for the stairs as he folded, draping over her shoulder.

Rescue achieved. Now they just had to get him the hell _out_. Through probably every last Skitter and commander critter currently zeroing in on them.

"Wait," Mason said, roughly. "What – you can't – Karen–"

Zahra snorted and bent, just within his line of sight, to shoulder the blonde girl, too.

"Tracker–" Mason objected again, and Buffy swore.

So now they had amateur surgery before them, too, before they could return to the Second Mass. And maybe ten Scythe bullets left apiece. The mission just got better and better.

Well; they'd faced worse odds before. They _would_ survive this, too.

\---


End file.
